Tag Archives | fantasy comics page

Thanksgiving is being celebrated in the U.S., with millions of travelers bound “over the river and through the woods” — if not to grandmother’s house, then to the home of some beloved family member. Air and rail travel have made trips of thousands of miles possible, transforming for many the official fourth-Thursday-of-November observance into a four-day holiday weekend.

Whether you’re staying close to home, crossing the country, or traveling some distance in between, may your Thanksgiving be a pleasant one — and may you gobble up this fantasy comics page from a Thanksgiving exactly fifty years old — from Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1967. It features familiar faces, as well as more esoteric comic strips, such as Born Loser by Art Sansom (the series was only two-and-a-half years old at this time, having debuted in May of 1965, though Sansom had previously worked on Chris Welkin – Planeteer and Vic Flint); Wayout by Ken Muse (not “Ben,” as this credit mistakenly indicates; you can learn more about Mr. Muse’s life and career here); Mell Lazarus’s lesser-known series, Miss Peach; and The Berrys, by Carl Grubert.

If it’s been a little quiet around here over the past handful of days, it’s because we’ve been driving hard to get a whole string of books prepped and ready to go — he have our Tim Tyler’s Luck Essential and the first of our two Red Barry volumes at the printer, the finishing touches on the lucky-thirteenth Little Orphan Annie were wrapped up during the last few days of July, and I’m driving hard to finish a chock-full-o’-info text feature for Steve Canyon Volume 7, and then I shift my focus to Amazing Spider-Man Volume 4.

So we ain’t sitting on our hands when we don’t show up on a regular basis in this space! Aside from our parade of books, and the Red Sox’s latter July up-and-down fortunes, one of the other things that caught our attention is the recently-concluded Republican and Democratic National Conventions. This silliest of political seasons made us think of the Chicago Tribune‘s famous egg-on-their-face “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline that provided such a memorable capper to the 1948 Presidential campaign (Truman, of course, won re-election in November of that year).

That thought, in turn, made us decide to pull together a fantasy comics page from August 1, 1948. As is the case today, during the ’48 race between Republican Tom Dewey and Democratic President “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” Truman there were fewer than one hundred days for each candidate to make his case to the American people. With the two candidates campaigning coast-to-coast in earnest, our fantasy comics page features a Leslie Turner Wash Tubbs, popular ol’ reliables Nancy, Popeye, and Henry, a Fred Lasswell Barney Google/Snuffy Smith, grins with the Bumsteads in Blondie, Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer, hardball action in Ozark Ike, Alley Oop, and — as proof that single-panel features could contain continuity like their multi-panel brethren, Our Boarding House, featuring that lovable bloviating blowhard, Major Hoople (a perfect character to follow during an election year, for obvious reasons!).

Something about all these strips may catch your eye; join me on the other side and we’ll discuss it.

Did you notice that each of these strips is dated 07/31/48? Yet they all appeared in newspapers on August 1st. How could this happen?

Well, August 1st, 1948 was a Sunday, and some small-town sheets did not publish on a seven days a week schedule and also did not have the budget to support a color Sunday comics section. As a result, they ran Saturday strips in their Sunday edition, as was the case with all the papers from which I culled the strips for this fantasy page.

We’ll offer the hope the gag strips you see above are the most outrageously humorous things you’ll see between now and our own 2016 election day — but somehow, we doubt it!

Flag Day is June 14th, and this year isn’t just any Flag Day, it’s the 100th anniversary of Flag Day. Yes, in 1916 President Wilson established the date as a way each year to say, “Hurrah for the red-white-and-blue.” Flag Day isn’t an official Federal holiday the way Memorial and Labor Days are, and unlike “big” holidays such as Christmas and New Years, it has always pretty much passed without notice on the nation’s comics pages.

Still, since we haven’t done a “fantasy comics page” in a while, I thought it might be fun to mark this upcoming centennial with a new fantasy page made up of strips published on the fortieth anniversary of Flag Day, June 14th of 1956. Aside from their date of publication, there’s another common thread running through all of these strips. Can you guess what it is? (Click on any strip for a larger view.) Join me on the other side for the answer …

Blondie and Archie are “big name” strips with LOAC connections, while to the best of my recollection we’ve never run a Nancy in this space before.

Dick Moores and writer Ward Greene served up this installment of Scamp, while Pogo certainly needs no introduction to lovers of good comics everywhere. Gus Arriola’s Gordo always puts a smile on my face, while Henry serves up a very different view of childhood.

Finally, we put three now-relatively-forgotten strips into the mix: Grandma, from Charles Kuhn (who did hard manual labor, including serving as a fireman aboard USS Connecticut during World War I, then spent years as an editorial cartoonist before starting Grandma in 1947, when he was fifty-five years of age); The Reverend, by Bill O’Malley (a prolific magazine cartoonist who lived on the West Coast, placed work in magazines ranging from Ladies Home Journal to Playboy, and had his cartoons — related to golf, travel, and his “Two Little Nuns,” Sister Maureen and Sister Colleen — all collected into book form); and Chicagoan George Sixta’s Rivets (the lead character was based on several Navy mascots Sixta had observed during his own military tour of duty; Sixta worked for the Chicago Sun-Times; originally produced the strip Dick Draper, Foreign Correspondent; and published cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post, which is where Rivets made its debut before becoming a Field Enterprises comic strip). The star of Sixta’s strip is supposed to be a wire-haired terrier, and since my own dog is part (predominantly!) terrier, how could I pass up including Rivets in this “one-name wonders” fantasy comics page?